“Court”… An impressive achievement

Note the way Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court begins. An old man. A bunch of kids. The setting: an unremarkable room. The old man is trying to teach the kids something. He’s teaching them about butterflies. He’s teaching them about the country’s geography. Now, note the way Court ends. Another old man. Another bunch of kids. The setting: a water park. This time, the old man is asleep and the kids play a prank on him. He wakes up with a start. He’s angry. He slaps a kid. There’s a world of quiet, distant observation between these two scenes. The earlier old man sits on a lower rung of the social ladder. He’s a Dalit poet-activist. He’s trying to better the people around him. The old man at the film’s end is at the very top of the ladder. It’s not just that he can afford to go to that water park. It’s also that he’s a judge. In the System, he’s practically some kind of god, inspiring people to stand up in his presence as he hands down oracular pronouncements. And yet, there’s nothing… now how do I put this?… socially useful he’s shown doing. Outside of court, we just see him chilling out. This isn’t an indictment. He probably works hard inside that court, and he’s entitled to his relaxation. Who are we to judge? But that isn’t the point. The point is that the earlier old man cannot afford to relax, not if he dreams of a better world.

At first, Court looks like a courtroom drama, a rather surreal one. If the phrase “Kafkaesque nightmare” didn’t exist, it would need to be coined to describe the trial of (and the tribulations that befall) Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar), the white-bearded Dalit poet-activist who was tutoring those children. In an early scene, he’s introduced as the “people’s poet,” and he begins to sing folk songs about what our economic and political policies have done to his people. He sings about “racist and casteist” jungles. He sings about “knowing your enemy.” He sings about malls. Midway through the performance, the cops come and pick him up. It’s clear that, with the things he’s saying, he’s a thorn in the government’s backside. It’s also clear that the charge they slap on him – of abetting, through a song, the suicide of a manhole worker (his job may involve descending into the hellish bowels of the earth, but his name is most heavenly: Vasudev) – is trumped-up, an excuse to not let Kamble loose on the streets, denouncing the malls that help them show how “shining” the state is.

What’s not clear – at least for a while – is why we see so little of Narayan Kamble. (And we see nothing of Vasudev, who’s simply spoken about. Would not a shot or two of his work in manholes have been useful to impress on the liberal, well-off audience that’s mostly going to watch this movie, here or abroad, exactly what kind of social inequalities exist in India?) Instead, we begin to follow the lawyer who is defending Kamble, a well-off, well-meaning Gujarati man named Vinay Vora (Vivek Gomber). We also get a peek into the life of the prosecution lawyer, a Maharashtrian named Nutan (Geetanjali Kulkarni). I’m making a point about their ethnicities because that’s partly the point of the film, how people from various classes and various castes and speaking various languages and belonging to all genders, all converge in court. It’s one big melting pot. Vora may do his grocery shopping at a chichi, air-conditioned store that plays piped music as he picks up (without looking at the price tags) cheeses and wines, but there’s no chichi, air-conditioned court for the likes of him. He has to go to the humid room filled with the kind of people he’d probably never hang out with in real life.

And yet, Court doesn’t judge him. A lesser (and lazier) filmmaker would have made him the villain, the upper-class ogre who frequents the malls that people like Narayan Kamble can only sing about – but Vora is a good man, a bleeding-heart liberal. He fights, in his own way, for human rights. After a day at court, he drives the manhole worker’s wife (Usha Bane) home and offers her money. And he’s the one on Narayan Kamble’s side, while Nutan, who’s closer to Kamble (at least in terms of economic status; plus they’re both Maharashtrians) is the one who’s arguing that Kamble should be locked up. But she isn’t an ogre either. This is just the job she needs to do in order to contribute to a household that consists of a diabetic husband and two young children. Vora may care more about Kamble, but that’s also because he has the time, the luxury to do so. If Nutan began to invest similar emotions into her work, she’d never get home to prepare dinner and still find time to look at some case work. Court doesn’t judge her either.

Court could have been called Mumbai, which is itself a melting pot. The film isn’t really about our judicial system – in any case, we know, from the papers and from films as recent as Shahid and Jolly LLB, all about the apathy of the system and the archaic laws and the word-of-the-law-versus-the-spirit-of-the-law scenarios and witnesses who are coached and how cases go on for years and so forth. It’s more about the teeming metropolis. It is about a defendant named Mercy Fernandez, who shows up in a sleeveless top and is asked to return another day. (The dress is “against the rules.”) It’s about the manhole worker’s wife, who doesn’t know her age. It’s about a Gujarati lawyer thinking nothing of defending a Maharashtrian even as one section of the city around him is turning hostile to people who are not “Marathi manoos.” The film sets up a series of parallel scenes that allows us to take in the differences between Vinay Vora and Nutan. He lives alone. She lives with her family. He drives back home alone in his car, with just jazz music for company. She takes the train, filled with noise. He shops for wine and cheese in that upmarket store. She chats with a co-passenger in that train about the possibility of buying olive oil and multigrain atta. He goes to the kind of restaurant that foreigners visit. She goes to a local eatery with cramped seating. His TV-viewing consists of “intellectual” discussions. Her family prefers soaps. He speaks relatively smooth English, reflecting the convent he probably went to. She speaks English as if it were a sibling of Marathi, filled with hard consonants. His idea of an evening’s entertainment is a stop at a bar where a sultry singer croons a Portuguese song. She goes to a Marathi play, a “comedy” about a Maharashtrian girl who falls for a U.P. boy. The girl’s father will have none of it. He won’t have his daughter marrying this “immigrant,” who’s “stealing their jobs,” who isn’t a “Marathi manoos.” This man should step into the courtroom where Narayan Kamble’s trial is being held. He’d see an “immigrant,” non-“ Marathi manoos” (who hasn’t bothered to pick up much Marathi despite having lived in Mumbai for a while) defending a “Marathi manoos.” Life, sometimes, goes beyond what politicians, with their simple-minded rhetoric, want us to see. And yet, their prophecies are often self-fulfilling. Leaving a restaurant, Vora is attacked on the street. The doorman at the restaurant quietly slips inside and closes the door. This is exactly the kind of reality people crave to escape when they go to these restaurants.

Except for a brief look at the goings-on at a Press Association meeting on the topic of “Skewed Third-Worldism,” Court has no use for –isms, at least not in the placard-waving sense. It’s about everything, and yet, the filmmaking is so delicate that we barely register the import of what we are seeing until a few minutes later, when we put things together and guess this is what may have been intended. Vora, with his background, and Nutan, with her background, and the judge (Pradeep Joshi), with his background (he’s from a family whose women sit at a separate table from the men, who have drinks in their hand; and he believes in numerology and gemstones) – all of this makes up Mumbai, and all of this influences the goings-on in that court. (Now you see why this judge has that attitude about Mercy Fernandez’s attire?)

By any measure, Court is an impressive achievement. The performances are uniformly excellent (no one seems to be “performing”), the craft is exquisite (nothing seems to be “crafted”), and the false notes are few. I didn’t care for the shots of Vora in a beauty parlour. And I winced when a typically fiery performance by Narayan Kamble is followed by a dance by “under-15 girls.” This kind of look-this-is-India editorialising seems targeted at a foreign market, the same audiences for whom some Indian writers write those pieces with lines like “I went to Varanasi and met a man tending to funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganges.” This… Western eye, if you will, is also evident in the filmmaking, with its tableaux of static wide shots. In the absence of camera movement, we rely on other things to enliven the frames – people crossing roads and walking past doors, traffic on streets, the fluttering of paper flags above a stage, a boy practicing on Roman Rings. This is the way the Europeans (not to forget Ozu) make their art cinema, and I wonder if – just like our commercial cinema has its own voice, its own distinctive grammar – our art cinema, too, can’t find a style that’s uniquely ours.

But in content, the film is indubitably Indian. Vora’s parents are all-too-Indian, in the way they welcome guests and pile their plates with foods and ask them if they know anything about their son that they don’t. That boundary thing – just not a consideration. And I laughed at the men who drag in a pedestal fan during a speech by Vora and coolly proceed to set it up behind him, not caring a whit that he’s stopped talking. They’re like Nutan, who breathlessly keeps reading out reams of legalese without pausing to consider her surroundings. They’re being asked to do a job, and they’re doing that job, end of matter. The stylistic choices, too, work wonderfully. One, there is no background score. And two, that static camera, which watches without discriminating, without zooming in and alerting us that this person is important or that one, without panning and asking us to focus on this setting or that one, leaving us free to observe what we want to, whether it’s the people arguing or the advocate dozing off in a corner of the frame. Like the director, the camera doesn’t judge.

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For me the film did strike as one that just places before you what is happening – people worry about the health of those in their family, want to take precautions, but on the other side they are hardly bothered about others life, the insensitivity that has trespassed into the middle class life. All of us look the other way.

I saw this at a screening at a university as part of a film festival that focused on Work… and I loved it. This is one of those movies that shows so much while saying so little.

I may be misreading you here, but are you advocating for the presence of Vasudev? I, for one, am pleased with the choice made by the filmmaker. We see him in a photograph, but he dominates the movie to the point of making me feel claustrophobic. We see his house, his wife, his chawl, we hear about his work, he is the rai·son d’ê·tre of the entire movie. All this comes to an absolute head when we hear Sharmila Pawar speak about the minutiae of her life with her late husband. I could barely sit still – she talks about domestic abuse, barely making it through the day, penury, the unbelievably rank circumstances of Vasudev’s work as though she were giving directions to the nearest bus station. Just fucking amazing. Evocative. Humbling. Moving…. (Sorry, can we swear?)

As an aside, I was part of an audience that was clearly pretty liberal, but so pleasantly clueless that I wanted to put my eye out with a fork at the samosa & chai reception after.

I found the film judgemental in the way it chose the life details of its characters. Same old stereotypes.

What makes these people who they are, why they choose what they choose is something the film skips. It’s satisfied with its own craft. To delve in the motivations didn’t seem reasonable to the director.

Felt like a film about Indians for the western eye. Complete with their cinematic language.

Self Contradictory- Firstly you attributed “Absence of Camera movement” to European Art film style and in the end you say “even camera doesn’t judge”.

Chaitanya Tamhane has mentioned this in all of his pre-release interviews that, this kind of style of filmmaking he has adopted because he wanted it to be like that. In a way, that static and wide camera frame is a metaphor for the judicial system.

sanjana: You should just say what the film did to you, period 🙂 Who cares what others think?

Amit Upadhyaya:What makes these people who they are, why they choose what they choose is something the film skips.

Really? I thought the film did a very good job of showing us what these people are. It’s a different thing that a lot of this isn’t really new to us — but for me, the way it all came together was quite impressive and satisfying.

Felt like a film about Indians for the western eye.

This I somewhat agree with and have mentioned it in the review.

rahulandrd:Why are the two statements contradictory? The first one talks about the style and the second one talks about the function. Different things, surely.

Thats what CT tried to do. He wanted use “style” of film to “function” as a metaphor for court or judicial system. He mentioned that The unimpressive world of the court (which is contradictory to what usually portrayed in hindi films) impressed him a lot.

rahulandrd: I still don’t see what’s “contradictory” about it. I’m saying that the camera-work is in such-and-such a style (which I comment on as being a Western kind of style) and then go on to talk about the function. I’m saying I wish there had been a more “Indian” style — but still, this style works because of what it achieves.

The static camera and the scene with a pedestal fan being dragged in during the speech. Sounds an awful lot like something out of a Roy Andersson movie. Yet to see Court. Do you know how long it will be playing in Chennai? Bloody exams are keeping me from watching anything!

Many Indians, the insensitive middle class and rich, as it is the norm now whenever a movie attempts anything on people from the majority other side, thinks that this is showing India in bad light and bla bla, .. quite fed up.

Also glad that you found no one is ‘performing’.

Sure now you will soon watch the real performing actor – who announces his performing kamals in every frame and muse about him. 🙂

BR: regarding our art cinema finding its own style, I felt movies such as Charulatha , Calcutta trilogy by Satyajit Ray, Khandhar by Mrinal Sen, Elippathayam by Adoor or Vanaprastham by Shaji Karun; that were made by our Indian directors did find a unique voice of their own. Even the style of European art house cinema is highly influenced by directors such as Ozu, Hitchcock ( Truffaut had mentioned this in his interviews) and others. I feel since art house cinema is fueled by the passion of the auteur for the art form you are bound to detect influences of the kind of cinema he or she enjoyed. Tarantino was influenced a lot by Godard

Tamhane’s admonitions of India’s judiciary are not delivered clinically; instead, with immense skill, he works them under the skin of his movie, allowing the story to shine. The cast, an assembly of little-known or first-time actors, is a marvel of verisimilitude, and Tamhane fleshes out his characters with loving attention to their lives outside the courtroom. After a hearing, we follow Nutan home on the local train, and we accompany her family into a theatre to watch a Marathi play. Vora wanders around a grocery store, picking out cheeses; he squabbles with his parents when he visits them, and he meets friends for beers at a bar where a singer croons Portuguese love songs. Sadavarte takes a family vacation with a large group of friends, many of whom look up to him with evident respect. Only Kamble is, with great deliberateness, kept beyond the boundaries of our understanding. He remains a cipher, just as he is within the court—an unknowable man with no personal history, trapped in a maze that he cannot fathom.

I was talking more about something like Ketan Mehta’s great phase — Bhavni Bhavai, Mirch Masala etc. Something that can be called a very Indian art-film style

Brangan, i am not sure even they are very Indian as you say. I can find influences from fellini to Kurosawa in those films. The very concept of art cinema itself is very western. may be something like Girish Karnad’s Utsav is a better eg.

True, Cinema is, in a way a western language and the only thing our filmmakers can do is to develop a “dialect” of our own. There cant be a new language within a language. CT used this style of film-making because it makes sense for the story being told. I don’t think he adopted it only because he wanted it to be “festival friendly”. I am not completely denying, Its possible, because it was his first movie and may be he wanted it to be recognized by world audience.
Idea is to make cinema of our stories and if helps them to understand better why not use their language to tell our stories?

Having said this, Court won awards in all the festivals it went. Over 17 international award and now National award for best feature film. I really think that it wouldn’t have been possible without the language he has used.

Gradwolf: Also, I wasn’t able to figure out the “presumptuous of people to claim they understand a filmmaker’s intentions” part. As always, the review — I thought — is a “this is what it seems to be all about” rather than “this is what THE FILMMAKER is doing.”

shabba, now how long before gradwolf initiates a kacheri with mincemeat “worldpeace” annan, Sir dagalti (வணக்கம்), mdeii chacha, and other sharp-tongued, articulate trichy/ madurai/ coimbatore/ tirunelveli/ urban madras mamas who will have senthil/ goundamani/ vadivelu for “ironic” DPs but will alternate between chaste british english and தமிழ் கிண்டல் (google translate vaazhga!)

BR: I thought it was presumptuous of Tamhane to presume that you presumed to understand his intentions. In assuming as much he wound up sounding a little bit like an ass.

PS: If this is what you get for appreciative reviews, I shudder to think of what the directors you have slammed are getting up to. Soon we’ll have mass manufactured voodoo kits with BR dolls complete with tiny disembowelment tools to be made available for disgruntled filmi folks!

“presumptuous of people to claim they understand a filmmaker’s intentions”

–> You must be getting tired of these kinds of comments! You must add a disclaimer at the beginning of every review that says, “All of the statements below must begin with, ‘In my humble opinion…’ but due to the lack of space afforded by my newspaper, I hereby request subjectivity and humility to be applied all of the below statements!” 🙂

Im not sure I completely understand why Kakka Muttai’s form is Indian and Ray’s is not. Is it only that the camera is less static in the former or is there something more to the “Indian” form of cinema?

Caught up at last. What a solid movie! Your review enlightened the movie for me in more than a couple of places. It made me think perhaps that the movie was made in a mirror-like fashion with Kamble / Vora on one side and Nutan / Judge reflecting on the other side. Aided by the presence of similar incidents (travel home, dinner, restaurant, TV, children etc.) for all these main players.

Anyways, the para starting with “By any measure,” is what CT is irked about as it is stating in a matter-of-fact tone that the film is tailored for western audience in few shots and its making style. Maybe that’s not what he intended, so what? That’s just one viewpoint which didn’t strike him perhaps. But both of you agree that Indian art movies do not have a particular style.. But unlike “slumdog M”, this movie was way more Indian and I thought that the style complemented the movie’s viewpoint.

Now, Court vs Kaaka Muttai for oscars and this has edged according to rediff. And you seem to have known this in July! And the oscars for oscar selection goes to…

BR, surprised that this irked you. You did pick up that he is in a beauty parlour after the restaurant scene, and is seeking to get the black polish off his face? This wasn’t put there to show what you call his Westernised ways, but was an essential part of keeping the plot moving forward.

While watching the film especially the last scenes with Judge, I was going like “God! Why is the director showing this?”. Seconds later, I thought “May be a payback time for Judge?”. Once the movie ended, It was like “Oh! You art-film making idiots ”

I get the contrast between scenes Kambli/Judge, Vora/Nuthan only after reading this review.

No offence intended. But it reminded me a Roger ebert’s review of “Ten” by Abbas Kiarostami where he quotes

“Ten is meant not so much to be watched as to be written about; his reviews make his points better than he does “

Dear Koveanthan, at any time it crossed your mind that it could be your lack of ability to interact with the film that is the problem, not the film or the idiot film maker? Appreciating this film take some effort from your part too, everything is not served in a platter.

BR, firstly thanks for bringing up the relationship between the first and last scenes. It’s breathtaking in its staggering simplicity. I’d been thinking about your point regarding the European art film sensibility of Court. I think I understand what sort of movies you are referring to here- Kieslowski, Bela Tarr, Bergman etc. If that is true (and forgive me if I’m presuming too much here), then I think Tamhane’s direction does not necessarily borrow their form as much as their worldview. I have not seen many Indian art films (especially during their supposed golden age in the 70s and 80s) but from the few I’ve seen, I don’t think they are as bleak, the way Court is, as their European counterparts.

A friend called Court a satire but I don’t think it has either the wicked bite or the belief that mocking something can lead to introspection and thus improvement. It has a weary worldview, again a perennial favourite for certain types of young men

and no matter what Tamhane says (“I think it’s very presumptuous of people to claim they understand a filmmaker’s intentions. No one can make that claim — you don’t know what’s happening inside a filmmaker’s soul. At best you can hazard a guess.I can’t argue with someone’s experience. If they felt a certain way, then fair enough. But to claim that is exactly the intention with which I made the film is really ridiculous. Either you don’t understand artistic expression at all or you’re claiming some supernatural knowledge of another person’s inner world.”), I am going to try to understand what the filmmaker wants to convey because he bloody well made it.

I loved the way the camera stayed at a scene and didn’t bother with following the ‘main’ characters; Another pointer to show the film is not a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare because it doesn’t think an individual and its experience is worth it anyway. Also interesting was the way conversations were shot such that the camera boxed a character for a while and then moved away to another character without cutting to reactions. All in all, an interesting film and I look forward to Tamhane’s next.

Hi, I watched the movie yesterday and completely missed out on the lawyer coming from a Gujarati background. How was I to have inferred that, does he converse in Gujarati with his parents (I could have missed it, as I do not know both Marathi and Gujarati) or is it from his surname or did I miss it when mentioned in the movie? Just curious. Thanks!